But Yet, Still I Cry…
By Dominique Oberling
As I write today’s article, I sit here with tears streaming down my cheeks, my heart breaking into a million fragments. My thoughts are short-circuiting. I am having difficulty comprehending. I thought I had seen and heard it all. But I was wrong. Dead wrong. My hands shake as my fingers search for the right letters in order to string together the words that my heart is desperately trying to form…
While reclining on my couch in my apartment and reading my favorite columnists as I do several nights a week, I was excited to see that Jill Stanek had written an article this week for World Daily Net. I really enjoy reading her work even though it is usually about a difficult subject - abortion. Her title struck me as odd, and if true, disturbing, but I thought that perhaps it was a descriptive technique and continued on. Jill continued with her article which led her to share a story about another video on youtube - although this one was about abortion. I thought “how sad” and continued reading.
Jill suddenly changed direction when she wrote,
“One person getting way more negative attention than she expected was Yale art student Aliza Shvarts.”
I remember thinking “art, this should be good. I like art.” Then Jill revealed the rest of the story, which was about a Yale Art student’s art project and I gasped and then found myself shaking and sobbing. Here is a summary of the story from the Drudge Report.
“Art major Aliza Shvarts ‘08 wants to make a statement.Beginning next Tuesday, Shvarts will be displaying her senior art project, a documentation of a nine-month process during which she artificially inseminated herself “as often as possible” while periodically taking abortifacient drugs to induce miscarriages. Her exhibition will feature video recordings of these forced miscarriages as well as preserved collections of the blood from the process….
[S]tudents on both ends of the abortion debate have expressed shock - saying the project does everything from violate moral code to trivialize abortion….
Shvarts… said she was not concerned about any medical effects the forced miscarriages may have had on her body. The abortifacient drugs she took were legal and herbal, she said, and she did not feel the need to consult a doctor about her repeated miscarriages….
The display of Schvarts’ project will feature a large cube suspended from the ceiling of a room in the gallery of Green Hall. Schvarts will wrap hundreds of feet of plastic sheeting around this cube; lined between layers of the sheeting will be the blood from Schvarts’ self-induced miscarriages mixed with Vaseline in order to prevent the blood from drying and to extend the blood throughout the plastic sheeting.Schvarts will then project recorded videos onto the four sides of the cube. These videos, captured on a VHS camcorder, will show her experiencing miscarriages in her bathrooom tub, she said. Similar videos will be projected onto the walls of the room….”
Some people who know me personally may be thinking that I am broken because I had an abortion in my twenties. Something I know God has forgiven me for, but a decision that I deeply regret. They would be wrong. I am breaking for America… I am crying for the country I love. Where did her moral compass go? Where did her love and compassion disappear to? What happened to the America that opened her arms wide to all people? When did America become so disconnected and empty that one of its children could put herself through repeated miscarriages to create an artwork that depicted the process on a canvas for the world to see? When did America become so numb that it no longer feels the pain of the aborted, and in this case, the deliberately miscarried? When did we become so lost as a nation?
I cry for America because sometimes I no longer know her. She has, at times, become something that I don’t understand, that I never dreamed she could ever become. I cry for Aliza Shvarts who thinks her art project is “normal.” I cry because of the deception so many women have embraced, myself included.
It took me a good ten minutes before I could return to Jill’s article. She went to on to write,
Thankfully, the world was appalled. Yale administrators interviewed Shvarts and said she told them her serial abortions were all a hoax. Shvarts then publicly refuted the Yale administration, who then said Svarts saying it wasn’t a hoax when it really was a hoax was part of the project. At press time the two were in a stalemate. Yale said it would not allow Shvarts to show her art unless she admitted she lied.
The Reproductive Rights Action League of Yale commented on the situation only after an uproar ensued saying,
Although we stand by the right to reproductive freedom, we cannot approve of her approach and presentation. The facts concerning the controversy remain unclear, but the consequences are very real and must be addressed. Like most who have heard of these events, we are shocked by the content of the art piece in question and the manner in which very serious aspects of reproductive rights have been treated. …
In Mike Huckabee’s book,Kids Who Kill , when writing about depersonalization in his chapter, How Killing Becomes Acceptable, he says,
“According to many criminal investigators, the first and most important factor in stripping away inhibitions against murder is the mind-set of depersonalizing the victim. A killer needs to psychologically distance himself from his target’s humanity. He needs to justify his actions by redefining his prey as a mere “thing.”
Huckabee further elaborates when he quotes Lt. Col. Dave Grossman from his book, On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society, saying,
In World War II, only 15-20 percent of combat infantry were willing to fire their rifles; in Korea, about 50 percent were; in Vietnam, the figure rose to over 90 percent.” What made the difference? Training. Military strategists discovered ways to condition soldiers to overcome their powerful, innate human resistance to killing. [….] According to Lt. Col Grossman, the same dynamic is at work in society at large. Our natural inhibitions against murder are strong. Without careful conditioning, most people are simply incapable of killing another human being. They have a natural psychological resistance to murder. To pull the trigger, lunge with the knife, or swing the bludgeon, they must first systematically desensitize their innate sense of the sanctity of another’s life.”
If I have not been wholly and utterly convinced before that we need to take a stand and demand change, I am now. How much further are we willing to allow America to fall before we reach out our hands and right her? How much longer are we willing to to sit by and watch these type of situations transpire before we are compelled to respond?
Abraham Lincoln said long ago when he was struggling with the issue of slavery,
“I should like to know if taking this old Declaration of Independence, which declares that all men are equal upon principle, and making exceptions to it, where it will stop. If one man says it does mean a Negro, why not another say it does not mean some other man (child)” (Kids, 44).
Tonight I cry. For me. For you. For our children. For women. For Americans. For the America I love with my heart and soul. I cry because I see we have lost our way and I do not know if we can find our way home. I pray we can. I hope we can. I choose to believe we can. But yet, still I cry.
